I loaded Win 8 Pro as a virtual disk on a separate disk from the Win 7 Ultimate main disk. At each startup I get the windows (I think) OS choice menu. In any case I have not selected the fast boot feature. So far (a few months) I have not seen any evidence of corruption using either OS.

I'm not sure what you mean by using Win 8 Pro on a virtual disk. Is it running in a hypervisor of some type, or something like Microsoft VirtualPC, VirtualBox, VMWare Player, etc.)?

Even if it is, and it's installed to virtual versus physical disk (for example installed to a VDI, VMDK, VHD, etc. that's a virtual disk mounted on top of another file system), if it still has access to the same physical partitions that your other Windows installs have access to (because you setup shared access to those partitions, in addition to the virtual disk it's installed on), you could be putting your data at risk.

The fast boot features in Win 8 are turned on by default. It's not something you enable, as it's already that way by default. Instead, you have to specifically disable that feature (as shown in the articles I linked to in my previous posts).

So, if you shut down Windows 8 using it's default settings, then use another OS (Win 7, Linux, etc.) to access any partitions that Win 8 had access to, then you're risking file system corruption (because the next time you start Win 8 again, it won't be aware that anything on the disks/partitions it's accessing has changed since you used it last, unless you're using Win 8's bootloader to start the other Operating Systems).

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JimC------

I loaded Win 8 using the Windows virtual disk capability, not a separate loader.